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Foreign policy, development assistance/international cooperation and human rights Currently, ministers of the German government other than Mr Müller from BMZ call for aid cuts to countries that do not take back asylum seekers whose request for asylum has been denied. While Mr Müller so far has not given in to that, it remains to be seen how the discussion evolves. Currently, as of May 2016, both the Ministry of Interior and BMZ seem to have coordinated their actions and rather offered incentives to countries of origin, e.g. when it comes to sending rejected asylum seekers back to Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. As for sanctions (the third meaning of ‘conditionality’) these are usually dealt with by the Foreign Office on a case-by-case basis or at the EU level, e.g. recently in the case of Russia/Ukraine. To cut a long story short, there aren’t any public signs of a coherent thinking about aid cuts, sanctions, and conditional aid. They are usually domestically motivated and used on a case-by-case basis, depend on the level of economic importance of the country in question, or serve individual political agendas. In addition, conditionality is not a preferred objective or means of German human rights policy. Germany as an economic power is rather looking for cooperation or economic arguments. Structural cooperation with emerging powers Over the last decade, Germany’s relations with emerging powers have changed, most notably with India and China. Initially focused on common trade and economic interests, relations with both countries now extend to global environmental issues as well as security policy and thus beyond the realm of classic development cooperation (Heiduk 2015). Human rights and rule of law dialogues are part of the package, but do not play a prominent role. At the same time, despite the economic level of China and India, both are, respectively, the number one and two recipients of gross ODA from Germany, followed by Afghanistan, despite BMZ having stopped traditional development cooperation with China in 2009 (Tableau 2014). Economic interests play a dominant role, illustrated recently by Germany’s speedy accession to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. In 2012, the German government published its “Gestaltungsmächtekonzept” (transformative or shaping power concept) which aimed at setting an agenda and framework for cooperation with emerging powers (Bundesregierung 2012b). The document attempts to cope with the realization that former “development partners” have grown into equally powerful actors on the international stage and that in an increasingly multipolar world, global issues such as terrorism and climate change cannot be dealt with with European partners and the United States alone. Observers have criticized the fact that the concept is heavy on rhetoric, but in practice has yielded few to no new initiatives between 68 Shifting Power and Human Rights Diplomacy | Germany
Foreign policy, development assistance/international cooperation and human rights Germany and emerging powers. They attribute this mostly to unresolved or even asymmetrical policy differences between them, plus a lack of coordination among German ministries (Heiduk 2015; Erler 2012). In public statements by German politicians, China and India are both referred to as competitors as well as partners, with the marked difference that India “as the largest democracy” is portrayed as sharing similar values, as opposed to China, but is considered less important on the global scene (Heiduk 2015). Next to BMZ, other ministries are considerably involved in the cooperation with emerging powers. Beyond the inclusion of BRICS, the concept is applied flexibly and can include on a case-by-case basis countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico and Malaysia. While BMZ focuses on global issues, such as poverty-related aspects of climate change and extreme poverty, the Ministry for Economy and Energy focuses on export promotion and energy cooperation, the Ministry for Nutrition and Agriculture focuses on food security and agricultural reform, the Ministry for the Environment on its International Climate Initiative (Binding & Kudlimay 2013). Among them, BMZ is the only ministry so far with an explicit human rights strategy. While the Ministries for Environment and for Nutrition and Agriculture have been open to human rights-based considerations such as self-subsistence farming, protection of indigenous peoples in climate change initiatives etc, the Ministry for Economy and Energy is known as fending off both human rights critique or suggestions from civil society and even other state institutions. This could be evidenced in the recent process on the National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights, or national reporting on the SDGs and their indicators. Therefore, while cooperation beyond classic development cooperation with emerging powers will likely increase, it will be harder to place human rights issues on the agenda, partly because of a lack of familiarity, or even because of resistance of these other ministries to human rights, and partly because of a lack of coordination among them, and between Germany and emerging powers. Initiatives on the European level Germany’s commitment to the European Union has been reaffirmed in the 2014 Foreign Office policy review and is seen as the result of “hard learnt lessons about Germany’s hard-nosed national interests” (see Kappel 2014: 341-352). While this institutional orientation is almost canonical on the rhetorical level for both domestic and foreign policy, its implementation varies among policy areas and depends on interests – and upon the incumbent minister. In a recent consultation with civil society on his development policy, the Minister of BMZ implied that EU development cooperation is no arena he would engage in as Germany does do not have a Commissioner there and in the European Development Fund you have 26 other countries who also want to have a say. Major EU policy initiatives have been triggered outside classic development cooperation, such as Shifting Power and Human Rights Diplomacy | Germany 69
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Katrin Kinzelbach is Associate Dire
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Introduction A sense of historical
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Introduction When in 2005 Angela Me
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Introduction What do these reflecti
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German foreign policy and human rig
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Page 30 and 31: From normalcy to hegemony to impote
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Page 86 and 87: Shaping the German foreign policy (
Page 96 and 97: The challenging inconsistencies of
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Page 112 and 113: References Federal Government (2016
Page 114 and 115: References Moremi, J. (2015) ‘How
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